System-on-Chips (SoC) provide various functionalities on a single chip. Typical components of a such System-on-Chips may comprise a processor, an oscillator, output drivers, and/or analog or digital input. Furthermore, System-on-Chips often comprise embedded non-volatile memories, for example flash memories. Such non-volatile memories are used e.g. for storing program parts or data for a processor of the System-on-Chip. Non-volatile memories also allow the usage of device feature configuration by updating the non-volatile memory, storage of permanent data and application codes. Typical non-volatile memories include flash memories, EPROMS (electrically programmable read only memories) or EEPROMS (electrically erasable programmable read only memories), but are not limited thereto.
The size of such non-volatile memories provided on System-on-Chips has been increasing over time. For example, new features like safety features and software frameworks in the automotive industry like AUTOSAR (automotive open system architecture) require increasing memory space for data and software code.
System-on-Chips generally are tested during a production test. Non-volatile memories like flash memories have comparatively slow access times, in particular slow write access, compared to other memory types like random access memories (RAM), read-only memories (ROM) or dynamic random access memories (DRAM). Therefore, testing of flash memories takes quite a long time. For example, for an embedded power integrated circuit SoC with 128 kB flash memory a test time for the flash memory in a backend test flow may be up to about 30% of the total test time. Increased test times result in increased production costs.
It is therefore an object to provide devices and methods enabling a reduction of an overall test time.